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Traversing the Social Pyramid: A Comparative Review of Income Distribution in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Richard Weisskoff
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
Adolfo Figueroa
Affiliation:
Universidad Católica del Perú
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DUKE:

Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense,

Such a dependency of thing on thing,

As e'er I heard in madness.

ISABEL:

O a gracious Duke,

Harp not on that! nor do not banish reason

For inequality, but let your reason serve

To make the truth appear where it seems hid

And hide the false seems true!

Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

The study of the distribution of income summarizes a nation's social organization and the outcome of the forces of social change. The measurement of income distribution itself yields a type of social scorecard, the resolution of claims by competing groups for the economy's output. As an indication of social justice, income distribution measures as well the extent to which different groups share in a nation's economic progress.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

Presented at the ECIEL International Conference on Income, Consumption, and Prices sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the Institut für Iberoamerika-Kunde, held in Hamburg, 1-3 October 1973, and revised for the Second Latin American Conference of ECIEL and the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, held in Rio de Janeiro, 7-10 January 1974. A different version of this research, emphasizing methodological aspects of measuring income distribution, is to be published by the Brookings Institution in a conference volume edited by Robert Ferber and Joseph Grunwald. In the meantime, the methodological appendices are available on request from the authors. In this presentation to LARR readers, we condense the summary statistics and include a sociodemographic analysis of the urban pyramid. We are grateful to the following ECIEL institutes for allowing us to use their information: CEDE (Colombia), CEPADES (Paraguay), CISEPA (Peru); and to Felipe Musgrove (Brookings Institution) for helping us process that information. We acknowledge financial support of the Junta del Acuerdo de Cartagena (Lima), and the National Bureau of Economic Research (New York) through a collaborative grant for Latin American research.

References

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